Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Ethical Issues in Nanotechnology:
http://www.ethicsweb.ca/nanotechnology/
The EthicsWeb is a collection of ethics-related websites, run by philosopher-ethicist Chris MacDonald.
This link is dedicated to ethics associated with nanotechnology. It includes an annotated bibliography at
New York Academy of Sciences, Peter Singer discusses “Nanotechnology Ethics” at
http://www.nyas
.
org/ebriefreps/main.asp?intSubsectionID
=
1121.
The Nano Ethics Group:
http://www.nanoethics.org/
The site states that the Nanoethics Group is a non-partisan and an independent organization that studies the
ethical and societal implications of nanotechnology.
Procedural Ethics Chronological Site Index:
http://csweb.cs.bgsu.edu/maner/heuristics/toc.htm
This site states that it is a collection of step-by-step ethical reasoning procedures, taken from a variety
of sources that may prove useful to computer professionals engaged in ethical decision-making. Some of
these procedures are examined in “Heuristic Methods for Computer Ethics,” which will appear in final form
Metaphilosophy
, Volume 33 (cited in this bibliography).
One of these may be a good match for a particular situation or, more likely, it will be necessary to combine
elements from several. It is always possible that a good decision would emerge from a
gestalt
impression,
without doing any step-by-step analysis, but it would be difficult to defend such a decision.
Although these procedures have limitations, they provide a fertile source of ideas and can reveal elements
missing from the decision procedure you currently use. In addition, it is possible to map elements from these
procedures into a uniform set of 12 stages.
NOTES
AND
COMMENTARY
1
This is changing. I attended a meeting of engineering and science educators sponsored by the National
Science Foundation in January 2007. Many shared new ways of addressing large, societal issues in
addition to the practitioner-specific needs.
2
This thought experiment is adapted from P.A. Vesilind, L. Heine and J. Hendry.
TRAMES:
A
Journal
of
the
Humanities
and
Social
Sciences.
Issue No. 1, 2006, 22-31. Vesilind is my colleague and
co-author of our recent topic,
Socially
Responsible
Engineering
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons,
2006).
3
R. Kidder,
Moral
Courage
(New York, NY: William Morrow, 2005).
